Stop using travel guides, start your own travel experience!

Please don`t conclude from the topic that I want to say travel guides and apps and companies related to traveling are all bad or wrong or useless. I use them all for each traveling, but what I want to say is that as much as they are helpful, they might limit your experience too!

In a well-known place or city, a travel guide can tell you where are the most famous places, how to get there, and even they will tell you by many pictures what you will see in there! So you`ll know what will you experience there and you can manage your visit very well. It is all great, but what you experience is something that hundreds or thousands of people already experienced that. In most cases you won`t see something extra ordinary or special that you like :”WOW I just did something few of people did”.

Aside from limiting the experience, is the quality of experience. In most places with high rate of tourist visit, the situation is like to serve tourists better and catch them more and more. It might be something totally different from the true atmosphere of the city or place in order to make tourists happy. Same thing happens for the food. You search for a good coffee in Foursquare app and one of the first results is “Starbucks” which serve you same coffee in a place like any other “Starbucks” around the world. Some times local coffee shops have no chance to be in such lists and therefore you might just lose a great chance to try something different.

So if you want to try something new and different and have your own travel experience, it is better to rely less on travel guides and apps. Trust your feelings and senses about streets and places. The result is not going to be always perfect, but at least you did something less people would do.

The cover photo for this article, is a very small coffee shop near the ocean in Taipei, Taiwan which only had a table with two chairs! I tried an Espresso here after a long bicycling. It wasn`t the best Espresso in the city, but the atmosphere and the feeling was all so great that I want to try it one more time!

There are risks and dangers in wandering in some unknown places, so it is wise to keep that travel guide or handy app near you. So if you got into trouble or get lost, you can find your way back to safe point very soon!